1. WADO Radio – 12 -8 –Ohhh
(updated 6-9-14, 7-22-14, 7-23-14, 7-18-15, 12-18/19-15)
(updated 6-9-14, 7-22-14, 7-23-14, 7-18-15, 12-18/19-15)
In his
earliest memories, he was dancing around a pole to Yiddish Klezmer ‘78’s in the
cellar with Sister Claire. The leathery brown portable
wooden record player, looking like Pop’s winged-tip shoes, seemed dug up from a
Bolshevik battlefield. With power on to volume, getting electricity though a
cracking power cord, the earthed wall replacement plug threw off
sparks that threatened a power outage.
A
slippery, felt, mustard-colored turntable top spun madly. The original iron
tone arm, stiff like Les Paul’s elbow, had a twist screw that locked in place a
needle. Sound, through primitive electrical amplification shrieked out from
behind an oval, wood-mesh facade covered with course fabric; a speaker still
pumping sound after sixty years of wear. Red shellac discs with ancient Hebrew
lettering around the center spindle hole were new when first placed there. Like
a loyal wife, was laid not on any other spinning table.
Pop pushed the
swollen door upstairs open and came down the rickety steps to the cellar; he
had to check why the furnace was giving not enough heat. Northern winds swooped
down on Brooklyn blowing out the pilot through the chimney. Behind the stairs
in the low-ceiling, 20’x40’ cellar space, a sinister-looking shack of grimy
nailed hinges creaked open in the darkness of bogeymen where no grandchild
would dare go alone.
Jonathan Livinsky and
his big sister, Claire, were spinning around, hands-on tight, to a wrought iron
support cylinder, in the center of the front room. Pop paid them no mind. In
their own merry-go-round, a primitive pole dance, the tossed-back heads of glee
and laughter ringing out to a Klezmer instrumental, clarinet honking over a
sawing string section; it was spiffy! It was music, and it was Rosetta stone
for Johnny Livewire. “Tootsie Mootsie darling dear…” Even the inner grove was danceable.
Johnny and Claire spun around the pole after each other until, dizzy, they
dripped to the dusty cement floor. They could hear the upstairs door open and a
woman’s voice call out:
“Se-dra-ter kinder,”
she shrilled. “Shiman, make it slower!” Bubby was not coming down; she had more
important things to do in the kitchen. The old house was rocking. Shiman didn’t
hear in the noisy furnace stall. Claire obeyed and turned the record player off.
Dim light filtered in from the small front cellar window. Bubby had prepared
dinner the day before the Shabbos and was going to “bench lich,” light the
candles; the food would soon be warmed and dinner ready. Bubby didn’t mess with
electricity or music on the Sabbath but it was okay for the kinder to do so, up
to a point; no music or TV during candle lighting.
“Oy Rosie, I’m making
heat,” called back Pop when the children went to tell him. A few steps across
from the furnace bin, there was another forbidden room of darkened planks.
Johnny and Claire had a chance to enter and explore it behind Pop. Behind him
they slipped in and zipped under his arm. Pop went to get the homemade
sauerkraut he had fermenting in a cool jar on a casually made wooden shelf near
his workbench.
Saturday evening
after a walk through Scandinavian Bay Ridge with Mom; Dad on shift at Idlewild
Airport coming later. Leaves on the maple trees in Borough Park had turned
golden and fallen well before Rosh Hashanah eve. They passed the row of white
stone town houses with high patios, passed the roller hockey rink where the
goyum boys made noise knocking their rolls of black electric tape around,
across the street from the Monastery of the Precious Blood, a massive medieval
church and retreat, a forest of tree limbs over red brick walls, perhaps
tainted with the precious blood itself. It was enough to make Johnny and Claire
shiver as they skipped and sang, “Over the river and through the woods to
grandmother’s house we go.” Down a block of trashy little apartment buildings
near Ft. Hamilton Parkway they went and into the Yiddish side of town. Straight
from the Lower Eastside, the theater awaited with “Galloping Comediennes” with 78
RPM’s on Bubby and Pop’s Victrola; “The Good Ship Lollipop” with “Peter and the
Wolf.” She was eight and he was six, they rode on horses made of sticks. Later,
she would laugh and say, “Remember when we used to play ‘Bang Bang’?”
When Johnny slept
over, on those rare nights his parents went to an affair, she sang him to bed
with a lullaby. “Ahh-ahh-Joniliah,” sang Bubby. In the late afternoon, around
tea time, it was Bubby singing “Yisroael, Yisroael, Du vas leban du vas blean…”
All he knew is it was a song about Israel. The TV played Ted Mack’s Amateur
Hour and Lawrence Welk, and sister Claire took to playing the accordion. There
was never any radio on, and only Mitch Miller’s choir singing “By the Light of
the Silvery Moon” on a portable record player his aunt had gotten free for
opening a bank account at a new branch, but Johnny has music etched into his
soul at an early age.
At Shabbos service
for children, he lit the menorah candles sang the Hanukkah prayers and songs,
though never as well as Claire, and he learned the Hebrew verb conjugations
musically at Sunday morning lessons with Miss Greenspan.
Such sad melodies so
many of the songs seemed to have. The melancholy melodies were his first blues
songs, the half tones of Jewish prayers, the crying voices of the great cantors
on those large 78’s, all seeped in. They opened doors in his mind that let the
dim light out, but not the bright sun in. Johnny understood immediately his predicament
in the world: the blues couldn’t be washed away.
Earlier, Leonard Livinsky sat in the workshop he’d made in the
tenement apartment they occupied since it was new in ’49, like their marriage,
It had happened the day before, a Sunday, a day of rest. Lenny relaxed by
tinkering with electronics. A soldering iron, solder rolled in thick cardboard
spools, flux, resisters, vacuum tubes, and copper wires in different plastic
colors that he knew how to connect to make music come out of self-assembled
receivers from Lafayette. The cluttered little room, just a clothing closet,
the dowel stick wardrobe removed from one side. On the other side, overhead, an
ancient three-band shortwave radio with and alternating modulation, too. Under
the homemade wooden shelving, a rack of clothes, still in dry-cleaner plastic
sheath, stood distributed on wire and articulated hangers, wall to little wall.
The clothes in thin casements clung to Lenny’s naked back, peeled occasionally
when he stood to reach or bend, brushed against him as he sat before a work
table; two mismatched pieces of discarded hard wood, a half-inch thick inch
thick, one an original moss green piece from a cabinet someone had thrown away,
the other a tan fine grain sheet, varnished or shellacked, shiny in places but
dull where Lenny’s leaning had worn it down. These two pieces of wood, not one,
but two pieces, in lieu of too expensive lumber yard wood, were spliced
together underneath with nails on a narrow strip of wood, two inches wide. Even
the molding was procured. Everything in Leonard Livinsky’s life was like that;
put together from scraps, his family included.
Johnny sat to his father’s side on a vinyl cushion chair dragged in
from the kitchen, placed away from “the work” of his father, as he had been
warned to do. The smell of soldier wafted through the tiny space oblivious to
the danger. The tiny closet that became his father’s workshop, every nook of
shelves above laden with boxes; shoe boxes, recycled wooden drawers from
forgotten dressers, three feet over the work table, and the three feet under
the work space, barely room to stretch his slipper feet. Side and front
pegboard walls with screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, pliers, clamps, measuring
triangles and a steel ruler hanging, each in its place; screws, nuts, washers
of all sizes that he would need one day on a project. A homemade stand with
three metal rings to rest a soldering iron on a metal base sat smoldering,
still plugged in to the light fixture’s naked bulb handing from an eye. “Go ask
your mother when dinner’s ready,” he said to Johnny without moving an eye off
the transistor in the green motherboard. It was the only way Johnny was allowed
to help his dad work; running errands. “Go get me a pack of Pall Mall, will ya?
Here, you know what to get, right?” Leonard did not want his son sitting there;
he was making him uncomfortable as he assembled the amplifier. Dad and mom
would talk about Johnny. That’s what they did as ‘The Late Show” became “The
Late Late Show,” the same Syncopated Clock tick-tocking the musical string
section. In the evening, dad made music machines from scratch, for fun.
Johnny came back soon from up the block, passed the kitchen where
Claire stuck her tongue out at him for no reason, walked through his parents’
bedroom into the closet in the corner and handed dad the cigarettes and change.
“Put it over there,” he gestured with his left elbow. Johnny sat back down on
the chair he had dragged in from the kitchen. “Don’t you have homework or
studying to do?” Johnny didn’t and, no, he didn’t have anyone to go outside and
play with, either; all the neighborhood kid goyum were having tradition late
afternoon Sunday lunches with their families.
Dad reached up and then tipped his chair a bit to get to a higher
shelf over the work bench for something he needed, dangling naked light bulb an
inch from singing his chest hair, bending slightly the jerry-rigged tabletop
with a soldier holder hot attached with no on/off switch; pull the plug out;
that’s all, holding a soldier iron carved to perfection while off duty in
Calcutta’s World War II Asian theater. He reached up with the right hand,
steadying himself with his left, grabbing the top of the wooden box he was sure
contained what he was looking for, a box that had more weight than he expected,
and it came crashing down, glancing off his baling head, drawing blood, onto
the tabletop, then to the bench and the linoleum closet floor. The sound of
smashing glass, spilling glass in pieces on the floor, not glass but black
pieces of round plastic platters, mostly intact but a few shattered and
cracked, under the bench and the wardrobe. Johnny flinched. “God damn it to
hell!” yelled Lenny as he stood, hands on hips, and pondered the mess.
“Now look what you made me do!” but Dad was joking, right? But
Johnny was worried. “I didn’t do it Dad, I promise, I was just watching, I
didn’t do it, please, please.” Johnny knew what might happen. He started
backing away from the work closet.
“What in God’s name was that?” came his Mom’s voice loudly from
around the bend in the kitchen. She’d put a pot down and was coming.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Alright alright already, Shut the hell up, damn it!” Johnny looked
down as Mom entered.
“Look what Dad did;” Johnny held his forehead with his left hand and
pointed for his Mom to see with the right. Dad looked down.. There scattered on
the floor were a pile of black 45 r.p.m. records, records that Dad had stored
in the work closet.
“Ooooh, I’m telling Claire,” said Johnny undiplomatically. The
records were Claire’s. It was her collection of Bobby Rydell, Johnny Cymbal
“Mr. Bass Man”, The Royal Teen’s “Short Short,” and so on; her pride and joy
collection, most of the records she owned.
“You tell your sister and, I swear, I’ll kill you; do you hear?”
“Claire, Claire, you know what Dad did,” went Johnny through the rat
maze tenement rooms to the kitchen.
“What do you want?” said Claire. Johnny never got to tell. The heavy
hand grabbed him by the shirt. Claire stuck out her tongue at Johnny again and
thumbed her nose. Lenny flung Johnny onto the bed.
“You lousy kid! Now you’ll it. Now you’ll get it.”
Dad pinned Johnny down with his foot on the sofa, removed his
leather belt and proceeded to whip his son, mercilessly, incessantly. Mother
screamed and pleaded, “Leonard, Leonard, no, you’ll kill him, stop!” But
Leonard went on. “I’ll kill him alright,” Johnny screamed at the top of his
lungs, cried bloody murder and begged his father to stop saying, “I’m sorry,
I’m sorry,” but nothing helped, escaping was in vein. Claire stood behind her
father and held her mouth in a chuckle, her eyes crossed when Johnny looked up
for support.
Johnny’s parents were talking about him. What was wrong with him?
Stop the music, that’s what Dad did. Johnny stopped the music from being
destroyed. Johnny, the scapegoat for the music, was as meek as a lamb. Maybe
that’s where he learned to tolerate ridicule. Johnny would come out of it one
day. His father ousted him.
Sister Claire and Johnny's father were record owners. Claire loved her
45's and so did Dad, but dad also had long-players; LP's. With father gone
living with another woman on Long Island somewhere and Claire busy with her
rah-rah zips-boom-bah crowd, all the records were Johnny's; Claire later
claimed "Hushabye" and "Little Star" as her own but
shrugged off the rest. One of Mom's friend's, who felt badly for her about what
her husband had done, did things for Johnny who was a young man in need of a
good role model. They didn't know that Johnny had already chosen two-thirds of
one; one third Ms. Elsa's sensuous kissing in the hall and one third Moses’
long hair, attire and marijuana. Johnny brought the music to the party of his
life.
He was coming around on The Beatles after voting for the Four
Seasons on the Vee-Jay Battle of The Bands LP. The Four Seasons were domestic
while The Beatles were foreign. The Four Seasons were older and more mature.
The Four Seasons were well kempt with short hair; The Beatles wore strange
collarless suits with hair in bangs down to their eyebrows, just like girls.
When his parents
divorced, it was Johnny’s fault; he just knew it, but what could he do? He
cried under the blanket wishing Dad would come back. Then, he realized how
liberated he would be without the threat of his father. His Jewish friends
mocked him, so he played with non-Jews. Then, they abandoned him, too, for
killing their savior two thousand years before, so he went to play with the Chinese
boy who didn’t know anything about Europeans, and felt secure.
Music became Johnny’s
recluse. Dad had left his stereo, his 45’s and LP’s. Once, when he was ill, his
father returned asking if he could get him anything when he came to visit. “(You
Know You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself,” sang Frankie Valli. By the time of his Haftorah
reading at his Bar Mitzvah, Johnny was a record collector. Mom took him to the
Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park for his first concert; The Four
Seasons. He won tickets from 77 WABC to see Steppenwolf do their first hit, “Born
to Be Wild” live at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. It was the time he saw
Goldie McJohn, the long-haired organ player, keel over backwards knocking down
a stack of Marshalls. It was so cool. Johnny knew then what he wanted to be; a
rock star. He sang in the school chorus every year. But there was more. He
discovered his Dad’s stack of Playboys in the closet one day. Nothing was the
same after that. Mom had to tell him to stop wetting the bed. Then came junior
high school and the girls became very interesting. Even the teachers were
sexier.
“”Did you ever meet him in front of the pawn shop and kiss him under
the balls?” The club roared with laughter. It was like the fat stripper in the
casino in the bungalow colony; dirty laughter, some drunken laughter, cigarette
smoke cleavage, some fancy woman, seated, taking a guest’s private part into
her mouth in the phone booth.
Johnny found the Belle Barth record along with the Shelly Berman and
Allan Sherman records in Dad’s abandoned collection. He put them together with
Port Said, the Middle East music with the glossy color cover of a belly dancer
with jewels covering her nipples. The sexy records with dirty jokes, Couples, the novel by John Updike, with
the erotic chapters; Johnny found them all to his liking. The girl next door
who whom he played gynecologist, even spying Claire naked in the bathroom after
a shower through the cat screened window.
Everything was there to be
discovered by Johnny; homosexuality: daring to take a lick of his little friend’s
penis, a lick he found distasteful, a chase in the basement by the
superintendent’s brother for what he knew it was after, unwillingly, at last,
unless he ran away. Rape: he ran, not wanting to be done unwillingly, either. Homelessness:
the bald man he saw through the basement window, asleep on a flattened cardboard
in the apartment building basement. Young lust: the disheveled boy and
girlfriend exiting the basement, emerging through the laundry room; the discovery
of empty sausage skins with jelly inside from where they had lain. Lesbianism,
in junior high school no less.
She was as tender to
her as a man could be, so Johnny imagined.
He had only kissed a
few girls, in slow motion. He noticed their eyes were open, waiting for him; both
the girls he kissed. He had kissed his grandfather and some other male relatives,
never got a hard-on; only out of respect. Did women get hard-ons when they
kissed each other? Did something on them get hard or did they just melt? How
could it be possible to do both at the same time? The hardness of sex, the
melting was love. Johnny knew what it was.
The cosmopolitan
woman with short blonde hair was his English teacher, Ms. Elsa. The woman in
her embrace at school in the deserted corner of the third floor may have been a
parent, it was Open School Week. Johnny wasn’t sure who she was and didn’t try
to get a better look. He had not seen her before, but he recognized his teacher.
They looked so beautiful together like that,
though they were both women. He knew the stranger wasn’t a teacher in their
junior high school. It was Ms. Elsa, who liked “Light My Fire” and played it
for the class. It may not be okay to do this, but he wouldn’t tell anyone, just
in case. He wouldn’t want Ms. Elsa to have trouble.
The combination of
the hit with the dreamy B side, “Crystal Ship” opened the doors of perception
to Johnny who was, in the course of a summer, ready for anything that would come
his way. Ms. Elsa had brought the 45 into class the previous June in the lame
duck weeks of the school year. The portable record player the monitor had brought
up from the AV room barely played, sounded shitty, and probably ruined the
record as it did to all discs placed on its sandpaper disc surface. She had run
off thirty-five copies on the mimeograph machine in the closet in the main
office. The smell of blue alcohol must be an entry drug for LSD with a pit stop
for marihuana, because he had been prepared for this all his life; it’s what
school was about in the 1960’s; preparation.
In ’67, the summer of
love, he wasn't old enough to create, but Johnny was young enough to absorb,
like a blotter does with acid, the essence, not the mundane; everything. He
knew how to get high without inducing catalysts but the catalysts provided a
social context for him to do publicly what he had been doing privately all his
life. His head had gone spinning on amusement park rides in Nelly Bly and then
graduated to Coney Island. He had gotten dizzy on stolen cigarettes from
Mom's handbag for years.
In ’68, Mom took him
to the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park for his first concert; The Four
Seasons. Then, he won tickets from 77 WABC to see Steppenwolf do their first
hit, “Born to Be Wild” live at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. It was the time
he saw Goldie McJohn, the long-haired organ player, keel over backwards
knocking down a stack of Marshalls. It was so cool. Johnny knew then what he
wanted to be; a rock star.
Jaynell's was the store on 13th Avenue where he got one free 45 for
each ten he purchased. “Rock Me,” with its 1:06 minute bridge, was the
eleventh, but it kept skipping on Dad’s Garrard. Despite exchanging it a few
times, it still skipped. Johnny kept it and played the B side, “Jupiter’s
Child.”
He liked getting high
as a child likes spinning in a playground. The liquor bottles in Mom's cabinet
were now more water than booze from all the times he'd sampled and refilled
them; Mom wasn't a drinker and neither were her guests. The only thing Johnny
hadn't ever done on purpose was sniff glue from paper bags like some of the
older boys did in the well of school yard near his apartment. He decided it
couldn't be good for you after seeing the gang tripping over themselves and
staggering out angrily; How could it be good for you if it made you stagger or
angry?
When his sister,
Claire, came home with her hippie boyfriend one day, he had a role model. She
had met Moses through a friend at her high school. Scraggly unkempt dirty blond
hair past his shoulders must have taken months to get there; he wasn't an
overnight hippie. If Johnny started that afternoon, he could look like Moses by
the time he entered high school in September. He would have to shuck his white
corduroy Nehru jacket though to get that grungy effect. Moses wore what could
only be called Indian carpet bell bottoms. Johnny swore he'd seen the same
pattern in a store on Atlantic Avenue once when his Mom had brought him to a
neighbor's pet shop and they stopped in next door for mahmul and baklava. He
could almost smell the incense drifting from Moses' pants, a musty scent he was
told, as from the sex glands of a deer. The water buffalo leather flip flops
completed the look. The ornamental belt wasn't necessary to keep Moses’ pants
up; Johnny was impressed that a belt need not be worn for a function.
Moses
asked Claire if he could do 'it' there and pointed to Mom's bedroom. Sam said
uh-huh and went to the bathroom. Johnny followed Moses who removed a baggie
from his pocket and waved it in Johnny's face like a hypnotizing charm. The
contents were green shredded leaves, not unlike parsley. Johnny was excited
about his first experience with marihuana. The 'it' Johnny soon found out was
the rolling of a joint on Mom's night table. Moses sat on the bed and poured
some of the content out. Johnny kneeled at the table a few inches away, so
close that Moses jokingly asked him not to sneeze, please. So that's what it
smelled like. So that's what it looked like. Soon, he hoped, he would find out
what it tasted like and felt like to have tasted it.
Almost reverently,
Moses rolled yolk-colored paper, the kind of paper Johnny noticed covering tampons. Moses pinched a large amount of the green leafy bits and placed it on
the crease of the paper, If Johnny had known about seeds and twigs, he would
have been skeptical; there were none in Moses’ stash. Moses rolled and Johnny sat
close drop-jawed as he licked the length of the end and fastened it along the
side. "Voila," said Claire enjoying the experience of providing
Johnny his first experience.
"Where
to?" asked Moses when Claire returned from the bathroom.
"We
could go up on the roof? It's safe up there," said Claire, wide-eyed with
anticipation. Johnny wondered if it were her first smoke, too, the way she
acted. "No one goes up there except on the Fourth of July to see fireworks
or to adjust their TV antenna."
"The
roof it is. Lead the way." The two pilgrims with their guru took to
the stairs that Claire pointed out. Moses led the way. It was a no brainer to
reach the top; all you had to do was go all the way. They walked up five
flights. He pulled the latch out of the eye screw in the door to the roof and
light streamed into the dark echoed apartment halls. Out the three stepped onto
the softened black tar of the heat blisters, careful to avoid wet spots. Over
waxy brown wires that littered the roof floor like snakes and connected to
primitive aluminum antennas with black electrical tape, antenna all facing
northwest toward the Empire State Building in the far distance of midtown
Manhattan. The three sojourners found a spot of sandpaper gray, dry roof paper,
sat down in a circle. The joint was lit by Moses, puffed, held in Moses’ lungs,
and exhaled in a flourish like the blowing up of an invisible balloon.
Then it
was Claire's turn. Johnny was wrong about Claire. She hadn't smoked before, she
indicated, and didn't want to this time, either. “How about you, Johnny?"
"Sure!"
Johnny didn't know how to take the joint from Moses’ fingers so Moses passed
the joint, back and forth, from one had to the other, in demonstration mode,
until Johnny got the gist of it.
"Let's
go to Manhattan. There's a groovy place there that has twenty flavors of
ices."
Moses had
a Karman Ghia convertible. Claire naturally sat at on the other side of the
stick shift and Johnny squeezed in sideways in the back seat, if you could call
it a seat; more like a plank to keep the front seats connected to the back
and a space for the lowered convertible top. The weather was fine and the air
was a fresh breeze down Ft. Hamilton Parkway along Greenwood Cemetery to
McDonald Ave and a right at Bishop Ford Parochial school and onto the entrance
of the Prospect Expressway. Everyone's hair blew in the breeze across the Gowanus
and Johnny kept on saying, "What will it be; Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan
Bridge, or the Battery Tunnel. Yeah, the Battery Tunnel! Wow, going through a
tunnel like this. He had never seen the roof of the Battery Tunnel before and
now, for the first time ever, to see it like this; wow! "Take the tunnel,
take the tunnel."
"Sounds
good to me," and Moses maneuvered to the left lanes that brought him to
the Brooklyn side toll booths. All the cigarettes, alcohol, roller coasters,
and even the holding of breath with nose pinched could not equal the
phantasmorphic rush of bliss that this was. Johnny’s kept thinking about the
Crystal Ship; how it was being filled with a thousand girls, a thousand thrills
and a million places to visit. This was the first of a million. Life was all
about living to be a million.
No music
in the tunnel, and what a time to enter. With "Penny Lane" on WMCA
just beginning, it was a double Beatle block. Johnny, Moses, and Claire joined
in just as Paul sang "…of every head he's had the pleasure…" “…to
know," they all continued," and the people that come and go, stop and
say hello." Johnny made the noise of the piccolo before the next verse.
"…never wears a mack in the pouring rain, very strange." All three
went “brump bump bump, Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes." Johnny
simulated the piccolo trumpet and they all joined in, in harmony, “there
beneath the blue suburban skies....” Three minutes later, the song ended,
mid-tunnel, but Johnny was a Good Guy DJ, and he started right in with the
second half of the Beatle block. "Paperback Writer," then all
"writer, writer…writer…" Claire and Moses were George's guitar as
they sang: "Dear sir or madam would you read my book…" Amazingly,
they all admitted later at the park, unbeknownst to them, when the signal on
the radio returned as they left the Battery Tunnel in Manhattan, what was on
the radio but "Paperback Writer" itself! Johnny learned what it meant
to be 'tuned in and turned on' that day.
The Karman
Ghia made a right under the Westside highway and followed Hudson Street to
Waverly Place. They parked near St. Marks Place and walked to the ices cart
near Washington Square Park. Johnny was amazed how Moses knew how to go
everywhere he imagined. He couldn't have imagined better.
"Oh,
by the way, Johnny, that was parsley you smoked," said Claire in front of
Johnny, arm in arm with Moses.
"What
did you say, Claire?"
"That
stuff you smoked on the roof? It was parsley."
"Are
you sure? I got high from it?"
""She's
sure, Johnny," said Moses talking over the shoulders between them" We
weren't sure how you would react."
"It
was a test," said Claire apologetically. “I wouldn’t smoke that for
anything.”
"A
test? What kind of a test is that? Thanks sister."
"Are
you okay with that?"asked Moses.
"Of
course I'm okay. What did you think I am; a cop?"
"Okay
okay, we're cool," and Moses reached into a sachet he had over his
shoulder. "This one is for real."
"Don't
get hung about it, dude, It's strawberry fields forever for you."
Johnny went
home and started a radio station.
Johnny never saw Moses after that day; He guessed his sister had
broken up with him. He never saw his sister smoke again after that; maybe
that's why they broke up. The next outfit Johnny remembers Claire doing
something with was the cheerleaders at her high school, her next boyfriend on
the football team. Johnny, on the other hand, got off the soul train at that
station and never looked back. The tone arm was on the record for good.
That’s how it went in Johnny’s life; people came, then they left not
telling him why they were going. Someone knew the truth but they weren’t
telling him. They did things to him. It happened when he wasn’t aware.
As a result, Johnny had a good feel for beautiful strangers. Over
time, it accumulated and had no release. As often happens, he knew he had a
complex but he didn’t know what to call the clogged-drain feeling that was long
and narrow, a drain that, if a psychiatrist could straighten out, would stretch
around the world. Instead, it was a place for waste that never cleared the
pipes. Johnny could feel it backing up, like a voice behind his back, talking, sometimes
many voices talking with each other about what to do with Johnny, something he
couldn’t do for himself.
He first noticed the feeling when he was eight. Sharing a bedroom
with his sister Claire, two years older than he, In the bedroom at night, traces
of dappled light teasing the darkness with headlights of car and buses heading
up the street, swinging across the ceiling through first floor apartment windows,
slats of Venetian blinds magic theater, Claire fast asleep, Johnny lay awake in
bed, face up to the dappled light. Closed bedroom door, the living room next
door, his mother and father there talking, smoking. Black and white television broadcasts,
past Johnny Carson theme song he could hum by heart. Someone change the
channel; he could hear it flipped through baffled white noise of stations that
had gone off the air for the night. Through “The Syncopated Clock” of The Late
Show, muffled mother and father’s talk. Talk about him. He had reason to
believe they were talking about him. Nothing wrong with that; every child
should be discussed by parent with spouse. These conversations never came back
to him; no outcome. They didn’t know what to do about Johnny. He didn’t know
how he’d become a stranger to them.
In ’67, Johnny compared "Strawberry Fields Forever" with
"Genuine Imitation Life" and he got off the Four Seasons bandwagon.
The Four Seasons were starting to dress like the Beatles, Not the Rolling Stones
or Bob Dylan; they were messy, not hippie, and they couldn't hold a tune.
For politics, his teachers liked Peter, Paul & Mary Johnny took them for
moral support; The Doors for his soul kitchen.
Johnny started a radio station.
Mom told him to turn the music down. Johnny made it louder. His
father's abandoned stereo system in his Mom's living room complete with
Lafayette amplifier and Garrard turntable, were now his. On the roof, Johnny
smoked cigarettes he'd stolen from Mom's handbag, a sip of whiskey from the
vanishing wet bar. He played it loud when Mom was away at work; Vanilla Fudge,
Cream, Iron Butterfly, Frigid Pink, The Kinks, The Doors… Louder and louder,
wilder than the last, but could they carry a tune?
Johnny was a singer.
Johnny's Top 40 radio; When Mom came home from work, after a while,
that wouldn't do. Turn it up when she goes away until she comes storming out
and tells him to turn it down again. Eventually he got a pair of headphones.
The summer of love, Johnny loved his records. Friends could be
inducted into the house, his audience. "This is the new song from The
Doors, "People are Strange." Johnny picked up where Ms. Elsa left
off. The music she injected into him would be too unstable to contain. He had
to let it out.
Summer closed and winter was coming in to Brooklyn. Johnny was in
high school; Led Zeppelin and Bloodwyn Pig.
Claire’s friend was waiting for Johnny’s sister to come back from
ballet class. His Mom was picking her up. She had a new record she had just
bought, something called Led Zeppelin II. She put it on Johnny’s Dad’s stereo,
turned up the volume and laid down on the sofa with a pillow between her legs. “Way
down inside, honey you need, I’m gonna give you my love, a whole lotta love
(zoom) a whole lotta love (zoom) a whole lotta love (zoom).” They girl was a
few years older than Johnny, but he understood what she was having. He wanted
some of it. Humping the sofa cushion, Johnny didn’t dare disturb her, though he
wished she would do it to him.
The record collection grew. Mom's friend’s husband was a record
distributer; gave him the newest releases; "Itchykoo Park" "I Can
Hear the Grass Grow" “Time Has Come Today.” Better than that, their kids
had outgrown record collecting; they gave Johnny boxes of 45's;’ "Hound
Dog" to "Monster Mash." Before long, anyone Mom spoke with about
Johnny had boxes of records to give him.
Johnny's radio station could not be contained; there was air. He
didn't care. The radio station played in his mind all day long, lyrics
memorized, sung at the top of his voice, substituting for a microphone. High
school was starting Monday. "Now it will really get
interesting."
Claire had another new boyfriend. Johnny liked him. He played in a
band called Pecker Frost and he was the coolest thing Johnny had seen since
Moses. His drummer, He had beads around his neck. Vinny, the younger brother of
Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, was Tony’s drummer. Tony Benedetti played guitar,
the first guitar Johnny ever touched. Though drugs around him, Johnny was sure
that he knew them well. Then, Samantha broke up with Tony; He wanted more than
she was willing to give; something,
Claire reverted to high school friends rebelling against home with Johnny
and Mom, but not against society. Her new boyfriend wasn't what Johnny had
imagined. He looked like a line-backer. His name was Reeve. He fit in with his sister
Sam’s rah-rah period; Senior Sing Contests.
Reeve was friendly to Johnny;
he was deep. Peter, Paul and Mary were too light of social comment. Dylan cared
only for himself. Reeves introduced Johnny to Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, and Biff
Rose. Reeve was with bushy brown eyebrows held up by heavy dark-rimmed plastic
frame glasses. He had a mustache. He pushed Sam around. Reef was fine.
"It's always the old who lead us to the war, always the young who
fall," said Phil. Vietnam was a threat. Reeve wore a green army jacket.
"There ain't no great day coming tomorrow because it's here today,"
said Biff Rose. "Good morning, Mr. Blue," said Tom Paxton. Johnny
knew the song from a version by Clear Light, the heaviest group he knew. Blue
Cheer had no cure for the summertime blues. Only Jefferson Airplane put it all
together. You had to be on LSD to appreciate The Grateful Dead. This was where
it came from! Johnny added it to his hit parade. Reeve knew reality.
WADO Radio 12
8-Oh in New York was on the air. No one could hear it but Johnny’s mind, An
internal dialogue between songs, classes, bus rides, subway trains, and meals, toilet
seats, just before bed on the distant stations from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Philadelphia,
and Toronto. Drifting in and out as Johnny drifted off to sleep, stoned on a
cigarette, sex with a blanket. WADO Radio, better than WMCA, WABC, WINS and the
brand new FM stations WOR WNEW, and WABC; soon to become WPLJ. Johnny’s radio
station went deeper into the mind. When Johnny graduated from junior high
school he brought his internal radio station with him.
In junior high school, Johnny realized he had
got something going, some talent in music and poetry. He was the only student
in English class that could see a relationship between Whitman’s “Leaves of
Grass” and the idiom, “not seeing the forest for the trees.” In fact, he was
one of the only students in class to pay any attention to anything that wasn’t
written in paragraphs with highlighted study words. Without much studying, he
aced every test in English, music, and social studies. By listening to the
lyrics when his dad played anything on the stereo, from Sarah Vaughn to Allan
Sherman, it cemented his affinity for lyrics and music. He fell right into the
groove. The joy he derived from catching the author’s intent in a lyric or poem
was intangible, nothing but inspiration itself.
The
mechanics of movable type at The New York Times printing plant didn’t thrill
Johnny as much as watching actors on stilts act out Shakespeare on a medieval
stage. He wasn’t going to become a reporter. That people could have dialogue in
poetry was a revelation. What he heard from classmates and neighbors was words,
only words about time and money, shopping lists, outlines of notes to memorize,
formulas to apply to science and math equations. Even art, though it may be
pretty and sometimes valuable, was never worth a thousand words, though one
descriptive word could surpass any sculpture, thought Johnny. It was only words
that could take your heart away. It was all one ever had to seduce with as one
passed through puberty.
Lafayette
Electronics on Coney Island Avenue near Church Avenue had a new record section.
He remembered going there with Dad once to get a do-it-yourself amplifier kit.
There was another Lafayette near Discount City on Bedford Avenue near Church,
within walking distance to Bubby and Pop’s new apartment in Flatbush. He went
to buy a new record he heard on WPLJ FM called “In-A-Gada-Da-Vida” by Iron
Butterfly. Full priced, he anxiously brought it home, removed the shrink wrap
and discovered it wasn’t Iron Butterfly disc inside; instead there was a disk
by a group called Fresh Cream. He hated it; no pyrotechnics. He returned the
record and got his money back, then he went to a record store on Flatbush
Avenue near the Kings Theater to get the album he wanted.
It was
September 1971 when Johnny Livinsky entered high school, There, he found
something that moved him as much as words; poetry in motion. Johnny’s will was
good and In Mr. Green’s art class, in his sophomore year, Johnny met his first
high school sweetheart. Linda. Linda was attracted to Johnny because Johnny
stood up to Mr. Green’s bullying one day.
‘Draw a sketch of
what you see when you look out your bedroom window;’ that was the homework
assignment. His classmates brought in pictures of apple trees and flowers and
puffy clouds drifting over the smoking chimneys of private houses, birds
singing from branches but Johnny couldn’t recall ever seeing an apple tree in
Brooklyn, and the only birds he ever saw were flying rats (pigeons) and
sparrows. There was an occasional dirty seagull at Coney Island beach.
Johnny drew a red
brick wall punctuated by a fire hydrant for his homework assignment. Mr. Green
was livid. He scolded Johnny in the middle of class for having no imagination.
“You told us to draw what we see when we look out our bedroom windows and this
is what I see;” said Johnny.
“That’s not what I
wanted.”
“Then you should have
said so.”
“I’m not going to
engage in these discussions with you, Mr. Livinsky. I want to talk with your
mother.”
Linda sat transfixed
on her stool, looking at Johnny, dreamy-eyed, head in hands, her elbows resting
on the drafting table. She had never seen a boy like this in Paris, France. So
brave! So much nerve! This handsome young man was speaking back to a teacher.
This had never happened in Paris. Johnny noticed her looking at him.
Linda’s eyes were
green with long dark eyelashes like frames around art; Freckles began at her
narrow cheekbones and dissipated around her curved lips, soft parted lips,
naturally red like a rose panted onto the slender vase that was her face. Shiny
black hair, extending below her shoulders, spilled over a maroon turtle-neck
sweater-blouse, in a thick arc of bangs over her eyebrows; Johnny had never
seen a girl like this in Brooklyn. Linda spoke English with a French accent;
that turned Johnny into jelly. From Bay Ridge to the chilled Scandinavian
blue-eyed blonds of Sunset Park, Linda was the only tasty imported flavored of
his life.
“I would like to see
what you see through your bedroom window. Yes?”
“From inside or out?”
Johnny joked.
“Ne comprend pas…I’m
sorry; my English is not good,” said the cutest sixteen-year-old in the art
class.
“I can teach you some
English, if you’d like, if would practice speaking French to me.”
“We can, can’t we?”
“I would love to
treat you to ice-cream and we can chat. May I walk you home?”
“You don’t know where
I live.”
“You can show me; I
have time.”
“18th
Avenue; but not today. My mom will take me today to shops for clothes.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes that would be
nice. I leave after period ten. It’s good?”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Oui. Tres bien.”
The kisses of Linda
couldn’t impress Johnny more. He was glad that he came; she was feeling the
same. They weren’t mechanical kisses. They flowed like wisps from an incense
sensor through to Johnny who sat relaxed in the art-nouveau recliner in her
mother’s living room. She sat softly in his lap, sideways, facing him, taking
his cheeks between her soft dove-like hands, bringing his face to hers in a
kiss of inclusion and intrusive. Her tongue mingled with his, darting, then
twining inward to meet his retractions.
Johnny forgot that
there was something he wanted to do with this girl. She removed his agenda and
showed him sensuality, a sensuality Johnny had only recently realized in a
romantic scene from a black and white film. Getting her was no longer his goal.
He lost himself with her and forgot he was a Brooklyn boy with a Parisian girl;
this is what they must mean to love Paris in the springtime, as the song said,
the Paris of lovers who stroll along the Seine.
He felt
something in the pocket of his jeans; it was a condom, just in case he needed
one. He wouldn’t need it; it was time to leave. Her mom would be home soon from
work. He said goodbye. She said au revoir.
Titus Oaks
was also near Bubby and Pop’s apartment, next door to Erasmus High school, where
Robert Merrell, Barbara Streisand, and Neil Sedaka had graduated. Next, Johnny
discovered the East Village in Manhattan. Free Being Records on Second Avenue
near St. Marks Place, low priced used record stores. A revelation! Johnny could
buy three or four albums for the price he used to pay at Korvettes’s for one,
then, he could sell back the ones he didn’t kike, if they weren’t damaged.
He was 17
years old in the summer of ’71. Johnny Livewire needed a job. He searched
through the want ads and found something he thought he could do: messenger.
Being a messenger at the American Blueprint Company suited Johnny fine. He
hated the thought of being cooped up in a building all summer. He could spend
his time grooving in the streets of Manhattan and New York City grew him in.
The handsome, six foot tall, haggard youth with long wavy brown hair to his
shoulder, parted in the middle, Romanesque nose, facial hair he didn’t bother
shaving, in his black, unmarked, v-necked t-shirt, black high-top steel-toed
construction boots blending into black denim jeans, wrapped his hard body with
leather belt to fit. Johnny’s deep, sharp, hazel-green eyes carried the warmth
of his soul to many a high school coed convinced and willing to feel his
tenderness, mold herself to his tenderness, and become a woman with him, almost
become a rebel with him. LSD, marijuana, Hiram Walker blackberry brandy and
Marlboro red; the chute was greased and many a young lady slid him in.
Mom didn’t
take too kindly to Johnny’s wide-open disregard for house rules. At least she
didn’t bother him about smoking cigarettes in the apartment; she smoked
Tareyton herself. But she only gave him $5 allowance a week. In the fall,
Johnny would be a high-school junior. He had to work the summer just to try to
earn a dollar. He took the West End BMT up to Times Square on 42nd
Street and walked to 5th Avenue. The American Blueprint Company,
with offices on the fifth floor, south side, would be his headquarters. When he
learned they would give him carfare to deliver the parcels, he had an idea: the
first day of work he left Brooklyn early to avoid the rush hour crush and
carried his bicycle onto the ‘T’ train, riding it past Bryant Park and the Main
Library, chaining it to a parking sign pole on 41st Street; no one
would know. He pocketed the tokens.
The time he
saved he would have wasted underground or walking perusing the Midtown records,
especially King Karol. He would leave a deposit on a record he wanted and pick
it up before heading home. Many a record was the first test copy in New York,
like a Blues Image or Iron Butterfly album. His collection grew and his rock
knowledge deepened. The rest of his earnings went for slices of pizza, nickel
bags, and Forex natural lambskin condoms.
Hank sat on
one of the dozen mismatched chairs in the grubby messenger lounge. The wobbly
ceiling fan kept the smudged windowless room barely cooled in the summer swelter,
the air tinged with the smell of blue ink and oil from the presses outside in
the large, worn, high-ceiling workroom stuffed with drafting tables looking
like a bland pool hall. The tangy smell of unwashed clothes wafted off of Hank
and tinged Johnny’s sorry nostrils and he sat waiting for his next assignment
reading his pocket copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao protected by its shiny
red plastic cover.
Hank sat a few
feet across from Johnny, shoes off, cross-legged, only brown-spotted tumors on
his downturned balding head, picking fuzz bunnies from between his toes through
the hole in his sock. Hank waited his turn, too. Philip Unger, an unkempt
overweight man-child in his late twenties waited, too, doing a word jumble.
They didn’t mind waiting; they got paid by the hour. The trip meant carfare and
tips from clients to Johnny; he took their turns, gladly. Hank was saved for
special deliveries the manager didn’t think Philip, Johnny, or the other young
messengers could find. Johnny sat like a roach in a corner come to life by the
manager’s call:
“Johnny, come
here,” the manager called into the drudging room holding a three-foot long
cardboard cylinder. “Bring this to this address on 65th off Madison.
Take the IRT.”
“Okay boss,”
Johnny said jumping to his feet, placing the two tokens in his pant pocket.
Stepping into the dilapidated hall to the original hand-cranked elevator,
Johnny waited for the filthy worn uniform of an old black elevator-operator to
reach his floor, pushed open accordion door and closed in, cranked, for the
slow trip down. He walked around the block, unchained his bike, and headed up
Madison, swerving through the Midtown congestion to the client, delivered,
tipped by, and returned to base.
Johnny was just about
to enter the building when a headline on a stack of NY Post newspapers outside
a curbside kiosk caught his eye. “3d Rock Star, Jim Morrison, Dead at 27.” The
date was July 9th. It said he had been discovered almost a week
before. Devastated, Johnny went to Zum-Zum, the fast food restaurant next to
the blueprint building, for bratwurst with the snap when you bit into it, sat
and read the dreadful news. His hero was gone.
Johnny met Vinny Fibriano in the student cafeteria one lunch
period. He was Johnny’s first friend in high school. Vinny, with sharp green
eyes, tight curls in his Art Garfunkel hair, was always sitting alone. Johnny
thought there might be a reason. Johnny was a loner, too, a loner who wanted to
be around other loners. If Vinny were anything like him, he wanted to be alone
because he was different, alone because he was ostracized for being different.
To be different meant to be especially interested in drugs, sex, rock ‘n’ roll,
art, or revolution. Any one of those differences from the typical Brooklyn ethnic
jock, dork and cheerleader would be fine. Ever since Johnny decided to break on
through to the other side, the sky was the limit, the sky was his mind. To push
himself to where no one had ever gone before was where Johnny Livewire wanted
to go. Life was too boring following a leader.
“Can I sit here?” The cafeteria was
full of sixth period students, not a bench seat was empty except for those near
students no one talked with. Vinny was one of those students.
“It’s vacant. Why not?” He moved
his tray closer to himself to make room across the table for Johnny to put his
own tray. The looks Johnny got from classmates he didn’t like made Johnny feel
justified in taking the first step. “My name is Vinny.”
“Mine is Johnny,” are you a
sophomore?”
“No, I’m a junior,” replied Vinny
as he bit into his ravioli.
“You smoke?” asked Johnny, more as
a joke than an actual question. Johnny didn’t even look up from his peaches in
syrup when he asked.
“What kind of a question is that?
You don’t ask anyone a question like that,” said Vinny disturbed.
“You look like someone who smokes.”
Johnny still didn’t look up from his mashed potatoes and gravy
“Why do you say that?” asked Vinny
looking up to catch Johnny’s eyes.
“Your hair,” said Johnny. “No one
in high school had hair as long, tight, and curly as yours”.
“Well for your information, I got
my hair from my parents.”
“Are you into music?”
“Why? Are you?”
“Yeah man, Rock ‘n’ roll. I’m a
singer.”
“Are you in a band?”
“Not yet, buy I will be. I sing in
the school chorus.”
“The school chorus is not rock and
roll,” said Vinny shaking his head in disbelief at what he thought was a
wannabe dork, but Vinny was wrong, very wrong, and Johnny was right about
Vinny, very right. Vinny made Johnny his first apple core pipe with a Bic pen
as a shotgun tube. Later, they tripped together. Johnny’s first time.
It wasn’t long before the two young
men became friends outside of school. They lived in the same neighborhood
getting off the West End line at the same station; 5oth Street.
Vinny lived with his family on the
third floor over a store front facing the elevated tracks on New Utrecht
Avenue. Johnny later learned that Vicente’s family was an adopted family that
Vinny lived with; he was a foster child. The 1927 walk-up was original to the
Borough Park Project in the then suburb of Brooklyn. Now, only the
neighborhood’s poorest tenants would suffer living within feet of a rattling
subway elevated train.
With his foray into FM progressive beyond the
top 40 of WABC, WINS, and WMCA, his pot dealing friends at The Square weren’t
the good boys who went to synagogue every Saturday morning, the ones who became
Boy Scouts and didn’t do drugs. They were left coughing in the dust of his
speeding life.
Johnny
gravitated to “The Square” led by Vinny who lived up the elevated tracks passed
the 46th Street Lowe’s Theater, to the pigeon park across from
Adelman’s Deli and Weinstein’s grocery of bagels, smoked fish, and kosher
pickles in wooden barrels. The Square had been the place for old Irish and Italians
men to cool their heels until the teenagers started coming around and making a
racquet. They crowded them out and they made their way back to the makeshift
bacchi courts under the Culver line shuttle. With religious Jews moving in from
the west and crossing 13th Avenue, the secular Jews, Italians and
Irish were squeezed to the edge of Sunset Park by Puerto Ricans up from 5th
Avenue and into suburbs of Long Island or even New Jersey. The Square was
squarely in the middle of a changing neighborhood.
The pair
of tattered wooden benches lined two sides of The Square triangular island;
only subway riders alighted there and quickly moved on. Old men went home at
dusk; pigeons grabbed their last morsels left them by the kindly gentlemen. The
teenagers took over. The psychedelic drug music lovers took the Ft. Hamilton
side while glue-sniffing hooligans found the shady New Utrecht side more to
their liking. Ethnicity determined the resting place of a few cross roaders;
but they scouted both sides of The Square for their friends and deals.
Musicians like keyboardist Jimmy Bianca and bass playing David Canola were
Italian like but had more of an affinity with the pot-smoking musicians. Johnny
Livinsky (“Livewire”) was the only Jew amongst them. He was an emissary from
the secular Jewish fringe to the west of Ft. Hamilton Avenue, one of the few
Jews not afraid to mix with the goyum, svatza or not.
